


we could be the way forward

by psikeval



Category: Erica (Video Game 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Background Hannah/Tobi, F/M, Getting to Know Each Other, Kissing, Post-Canon, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:20:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28164648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psikeval/pseuds/psikeval
Summary: Five truths learned and five moments of reprieve during the trial of Mia Greene.
Relationships: Duncan Blake/Erica Mason
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	we could be the way forward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cricket_aria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cricket_aria/gifts).



> "AU" is hard to quantify in a game with so many possible paths and interpretations, but for the purposes of this fic, there is no cult at Delphi House and no supernatural/occult elements are at play in the story. Blake and Hannah both had near-death experiences but survived.

**_one._  
  
**

Mia Greene is real.  
  


That feels good to know.

Erica started to doubt by the end. The way Mia slipped around the edges like smoke, there and gone, never seeming to cross the path of anyone else—even Blake had believed she was years dead, at first. But as Kirstie stumbled with Tobi from the underground rooms, they came across Mia, flesh and blood, collapsed in the drive. Headed for one of the garden paths, perhaps.

It would not have been the first time she’d escaped from Delphi House.

Erica goes to the initial hearings with her sketchbook in hand and a few favorite pencils, and slowly feels the graphite tips go dull and smooth, lines thicker. Mia pled not guilty, which means there will be a full trial. Blake already warned that the magistrates here will send it on to Crown Court.

Still, some things come to light even in these preliminary proceedings, the magistrates tentatively setting their teeth against the meat of the case. Unsure if they can, or should, really bite down.

Nearly all the records of Delphi House were unearthed, and they paint certain pieces of a story. It's confirmed that after Alodie Mason was admitted, Mia’s escape attempts began. They had been friends, or as close as they could be with one a patient and one her nurse. Some reports crudely hinted at more, like _that_ would be the scandal here—as if the cardinal sin Mia committed might be loving Erica’s mother.

Property was damaged, punishments applied. Mia was never dissuaded. When she succeeded, no one wanted to admit it. They had to avoid the scrutiny, after forcibly sectioning one of their own staff without grounds, and any investigation of Mia would lead to Alodie.

Dr. Mason, it seems, was quite adamant about that.

Those records were buried like so many other things, sealed into stone.

No mention was made of Mia once her false death had been documented, but the silence speaks—she didn’t find her way back to Delphi in time to save Alodie. That much is clear.

The hours drag on, exhibit after exhibit of evidence, vials and paper files and slide screens. Mia's gun. And Erica feels as if she ought to hear it all, capture it and hold it in her memory, but it feels like far too much to carry. She doesn't want to see the pictures of Kirstie's father or Karl Steinbeck, the ragged bloody piece of skin or a severed hand.

She darkens the shade of a shadow on the page and allows herself to drift.

“Enjoy your stay,” the concierge says, handing Blake a set of keycards.

Erica feels a little underwhelmed, frankly. She was expecting something like a safe house, reminiscent of a spy film, perhaps with a hidden arsenal of guns behind a china set. Bulletproof shutters, that sort of thing. Instead the MP have put her up in a hotel for the duration of the court proceedings—or rather, as long as she might reasonably expect to be called up as a witness. They will not be taking chances with a private residence, Blake says. Not after what happened to the chief inspector.

They pause in one long carpeted corridor, in front of 508, and Blake says, “I’ll be just across the hall.”

“You aren’t going home?”

“Well, I…” Blake looks uncertain, and his beard looks especially ginger in the bright hallway light, shining copper and gold. “I’d rather be sure you’re all right, if it’s all the same to you.”

 _Why?_ she wants to ask, or she could say _It isn’t all the same, you being here is better_. But maybe Erica feels uncertain too, if the crumpled little can’t-breathe knot rising up in her chest can be any indication. Maybe this is fear and nothing else. After all, he almost died once, shot in the gut by Mia’s gun in the red, red lights of Delphi. It would be easy to lose him. “Okay.”

Surely she’ll sleep light enough to hear anyone in the hall.

“We could…maybe get something to eat? Watch television or something?”

“Yes,” she tries, and it comes out too soft, barely a wisp of a word. There are times when Erica feels like she has almost faded away, nothing left to take up space or make a sound. She’s tired of feeling like a ghost. “Let’s do that,” she says, a little too loud now, spoken full-throated from her chest, but this way feels better. Feels like being alive, and wanting things.

Blake doesn’t quite smile but he looks—something. Buoyed, maybe.

“Indian all right?”

She considers this, nods, and clarifies. “Spicy.”

“Coming right up. There’s a place just down Leman.” Blake’s not-smile dims a little. “Lock your door, will you?”

Erica nods. Latch, bolt, chain: she will take no more chances.

It does feel smaller, darker in the room—any room—with Blake not there, and her pulse does begin to quicken, but there are little rituals to find shelter in and Erica has always enjoyed those. Lining up trainers with her boots, removing her makeup. She takes a quick shower before changing clothes, breathing in steam. She cups the hotel’s lemon-sage shampoo in her hands and does not think of the cloying sweetness of oleander perfume.

Over the years, she’s found it’s easier to dwell here in the little moments, the sounds of water in the pipes and the heat on her back. Getting through it. Until the pressure lifts and light finds her again.

“Picked something?” Blake asks when he returns, laden down with plastic bags—

—and Erica blinks hard, as if blinded. She says, “No. Not yet.”

Set right, the world spins on.

_**two**.  
  
_

Erica’s father was not a good man.  
  


He was the one sunk deep in mysticism, who bought into the stories of the Oracle at Delphi, and who named the house for her. He convinced them to experiment with oleander flowers, sure that he would witness the rise of another oracle. He told the orderlies and attendants, when the girls were half delirious, to wear masks—the same masks, every time. Until little legends spread among the patients who’d seen it. Until there were frightened whispers of a cult.

Rabbit, deer and fox. Quick and quiet, keeping to the shadows. Sometimes they’d let the girls wear masks themselves and walk the halls, as if it were a game to play.

Father was the one who took Alodie, the nurse, his wife—bright funny Alodie, who looked after each patient and always asked far too many questions—and made her a subject. Alodie had a small superstition, you see. A thought that sometimes, she knew what would happen before it came to pass. Just little things, like who would lose their temper at the grocery or what would be for lunch that day at Delphi. She had told her husband this, and Mia. _Funny, isn’t it?_ she’d say.

“Who’s to say she’s wrong?” Mia asks the courtroom, her tone low and her eyes unfocused, as if she could just barely hear something beyond them. “When he came to get her, she looked at me, and I swear it was like she knew. ‘ _Be safe,_ ’ she told me. I knew we’d never be.”

When Ballard examined Alodie’s corpse, there was chemical toxicity, cerebral hemorrhage, damage to the nervous system. Heart removed for study, said the notes; significant damage.

“But he had a daughter,” says Mia, and her voice is nearly sing-song, hypnotic. “With the very same mark. He would talk about her. Show pictures of his baby with the butterfly on her arm, just like mother, just the same, and they looked at her… hungry. Like a fox to a rabbit. I tried to climb out my window first.”

“I’m sorry?” says the High Court judge who’s been appointed to them now.

Mia’s gaze turns on him, dark and sure. “To escape the very first time. Broke three fingers in the fall.”

“I believe we’ve already covered that topic as much as we need to.”

“Of course. They weren’t my trigger finger.”

“Ah.” He looks to her lawyers, clearly seeking help and finding none. “I see.”

“When I shot Dr. Carter, my grip was perfectly steady.”

“Ms. Greene, if you please—”

“Erica’s life was at stake. You must see that, even you. A child would have died at his hands, no one knowing. I have done many things, your honor, but you’ll find me protected by the law.”

There’s interest, however reluctant, in the judge’s stare. “How so?”

“You’ve heard the intent of my barrister. Article two, is it, paragraph two? I did no more than absolutely necessary.”

After, they get drinks.

“Are you, uh. How are you feeling?”

Laughter spills out of Erica in a messy tumble, half-hysterical, and she slumps down with her elbows on the bar, carding back her hair with shaky fingers. How is she _feeling?_

Blake winces, chagrined. “Right. Sorry.”

“Buy me a drink?”

“Yes,” he agrees, so quickly she assumes it can’t possibly be allowed. Sitting with a key witness to murder in a pub, signaling for two pints of the beer on tap? No doubt Blake is only meant to escort her to the hotel and stay on watch.

Erica finds she doesn’t much care about that.

“So. Um. Sergeant Blake,” she tries, and he winces.

“Duncan, please. If you don’t mind. O-of course you don’t have to, it just—”

“Duncan.” Erica says it carefully, holding the name in her mouth. She watches the tips of his ears go red, and wonders if she’d see more of him flushed if the lights were brighter. Duncan takes a long drink from his pint and his throat moves steadily with each swallow.

“Yes, all right. Better.” He meets her eyes and swallows hard again, this time around nothing. “Fuck. Or not.”

She lifts her eyebrows, prompting. “What’s wrong?”

There, now she can see the blush rising up his neck. Duncan’s eyes dart around the bar as if someone might be out to catch him. “You don’t… _look_ twenty-seven,” he says, voice strained, and then blushes even deeper at having said it.

Erica shrugs and sips at her beer. “At least you’re honest.” It’s the ones who pretend not to notice, she’s found, who are far worse in the end. And maybe it's oddly flattering, that he's interested enough to have a problem with that. “I wanted to be a bartender.”

It's clearly not what Duncan was expecting to hear. “Sorry. What? You?”

She shrugs again, smiling this time. “I don’t know. Seemed fun. Nobody’d hire me though, because I looked too young. Hit on me, yeah, but not hire me. I decided to be a waitress.”

“Yeah? Is that still what you do?”

“Well, not right now.” Erica leans in close, wide-eyed, like she’s about to share a secret, and loves that Duncan plays along. He smells good enough that she lets herself get too close, til her hair brushes his cheek. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there was a _murderer_ next door to me.”

That startles out a real laugh. Duncan rocks back on his stool and tries to contain it by pressing a fist to his mouth, tamping down his smile before Erica can properly see it. “You don’t say.”

“Mm. I couldn’t keep up with my normal work schedule.”

“That’s a shame.”

“If I looked my age, would you kiss me again?”

Duncan’s hand jolts and he quickly sets his glass down. The way he stares at Erica is searching, so she lets him look. She’s not afraid of him, never has been, even when the walls started closing in and she feared her own reflection. No—her instincts are good. She wants this one. 

Whatever Duncan sees in her eyes, it makes him look away, cheeks now pink and ears flaming red.

“I’m worried I might do it regardless,” he mutters.

It feels like being handed soft petals, the quiet curve of a promise; Erica smiles. “Good.”

**_three._ **

There is no magic to oleander.  
  


It can be mixed with other things, and was—chloroform for sedative, alcohol for the perfume. An experimental mixture made in the lab with psilocybin, for more vivid hallucinations. But the effects of oleander itself are entirely predictable.

“Nausea, vomiting,” says Lucien placidly. He pled guilty in his own case and agreed to testify for this one, self-recrimination in exchange for leniency. He is full of such regret, he told the court; he must do what he can. “Seizures. Heart irregularities, and we saw quite a bit of poor circulation in the girls. Though, the bouts of sudden bleeding from the sinuses—that was a result of one of our compounds, not pure oleander.”

“And you made it on purpose.” Even the judge looks visibly repulsed.

Lucien smiles as if he’s humoring a silly, stubborn child. “My dear fellow, without experimentation, what is the future of medicine?”

Erica feels like her skin is crawling, and nearly jerks away when Duncan takes her hand in his—but the touch is gentle, bringing her back to the bench, to the room. She breathes in, lacing her fingers with Duncan’s, and the sound of air dragged back to her lungs is harsh like a gasp.

“You don’t have to be here if it’s too much,” he whispers, barely audible.

Erica squeezes his hand just to feel the pressure of their knuckles and the heat of his palm, the shift of tendons underneath her fingertips. “How much longer, do you think?”

“I’d give it a few more hours.”

She bites the inside of her cheek and glances at the high windows, clouds beyond. “Do you have to stay?”

Duncan licks his lips, quick and thoughtless, and Erica finds herself a little dazed by the pink of his tongue. He leans in closer. He feels so warm. “Actually,” he murmurs, hot breath on Erica’s ear and neck, a shiver coiling in the core of her, “I’m meant to keep you safe. I can do that somewhere else.”

It's all the permission she needs. Erica slips from the bench with Duncan just behind, a little thrill in her throat like it's a Friday night after work and she's up to nonsense with the girls, stealing drinks and screaming at the sky; just enough bending of the rules that it feels good.

She feels Lucien’s eyes on her as they leave, but she does not look back. Not once.

It’s a gorgeous day outside, early summer, sunshine after a week of rain. The ground is still soft and muddy, so they keep to sidewalks and gravel paths, weaving through crowds with no particular destination. Hannah texted about meeting up for lunch in one of the parks by the Thames, but Erica is still waiting to hear a verdict on where, exactly.

She waits for things, now. Things besides the other shoe dropping.

Odd to think that in such unexpected ways, Mia might have saved her after all.

Duncan glances over and catches sight of her smiling. “What?”

“You’ll think I’m completely crazy.”

“Maybe I’ll like you anyway.”

“Maybe?!”

He reels her in gently by the elbow and takes her face in his hands, thumbs tracing her sun-warmed cheeks. “You’re not crazy.”

It hurts deep in her chest, the reminder that none of them were. Not the way people mean it, the cruel and mocking frightened way that strips out who they are. They just had suffered, and were made to suffer more. Erica exhales through her nose and draws up a smile.

“You should really say ‘mentally ill,’ that’s insensitive.”

“So sorry.” Duncan tries and fails to roll his eyes; he looks too fond and can’t seem to look away for more than a second before he returns, compass-like, to looking right at Erica again. “Don’t know where I got it.”

When they do find Hannah sitting with Tobi in a park café, the scene is idyllic. Sunlight spilling down, on their hair, high tea spread on the table in front of them. Their hands are linked, and Hannah feeds Tobi a bit of cake from her own fork. From a distance you can’t see the tremor in her limbs. Hannah’s slowly getting back what strength she can recover, and Erica, watching them both, thinks that Tobi will more than make up for the rest.

Just like that, Tobi’s eyes cut towards them, narrow and watchful. She nods.

“Come on,” Erica says. She’d tug at Duncan’s hand, but he is already walking with her.

The ground squishes unpleasantly, boots sinking into the half-puddle mire of the grass, but Erica just ignores it. Already she plans to ask them about Kirstie, and their new flat, and the cats Tobi wanted to adopt last month, the tortoiseshell and grey. She and Hannah can talk about music. They’re owed a few nice goddamn afternoons, and she intends to have one.

**_four._  
  
**

It is difficult to be without comfort.

  
When she does take the stand, Erica feels so painfully exposed. In front of the judge, with Mia watching, it’s hard to breathe. She does it anyway.

“Please state your name for the record.”

“Erica Sandra Mason.”

“And what is your relationship to the defendant?”

“She—” The first question and already she feels lost. _I think she killed my father. I think she loved my mother once. What do I know?_ “She lived next door.”

The questions only get harder. Is she certain it was Mia, back when she was just a girl? Did she always know what happened to her mother? Did her father make the butterfly mark, did he, would they, could you have hallucinated this, Erica? Can you be sure?

More than once, she feels sick to her stomach with anxiety, swallowing back bile. Surely she's ruining it, with her fumbling answers and too-soft, stammering voice. Someone else should have done this. Someone else should have _lived_ it, who wouldn't crack beneath the weight of it all and sit here fractured without answers. Tobi could have done this, she thinks desperately; be a little more like Tobi.

_But don't tell them all to go fuck themselves._

There's no one else here, though, and Erica's hands shake in her lap, desperate for something to hold. A pencil, even, or a creepy doll of herself as a child, butterfly and all. (Are you certain about that?) She can't possibly keep doing this, but she does, and then somehow she has, and the roaring static descending in her ears drowns out the sound of her steps as she rushes from the room.

Duncan doesn’t poke at her silence in the cab back to the hotel. He just hands over a keycard, when they reach their doors, and says “Here. If you need anything.”

She means to shower, but drops onto the bed instead, eyes unwilling to focus on anything here and now. Her body feels cut into layers, one weighed down heavy as iron, one sticky and slow, and the rest just drifting like oil on water. Unable to combine.

When something—anything—surfaces inside her, it is nearly nine o’clock and Erica finds that she is trembling. It was just half six before.

There’s a chill in the room; that might be it. _Get up_ , she tells herself. And finally, she does. She lurches from the bed but the unsettled, hungry feeling only deepens, trying to sink her back down. She can’t afford to lose time. She cannot lose anything else, not today.

Before the momentum is lost, she takes Duncan’s key card and crosses the hall.

He’s laid down neatly on one side of the bed in a t-shirt and soft-looking trousers, and Erica moves quickly because it feels like she might shake apart, shattered by the darkness that’s made her a home, and she is _cold_ , and needs— she needs—

She crawls onto Duncan and kisses him, hard.

There’s too much force behind it, so their teeth collide, and the angle’s awkward, but she won’t back down now. Erica adjusts her weight on top of him and drops easy kisses, soft and open-mouthed, on his parted lips; she drags a thumb along the line of his jaw, coaxing his mouth open wider. When she slips her tongue past his lips, stroking over Duncan’s own tongue in the lightest little caress, they both groan, but he stays open for her, letting Erica do what she likes and explore for as long as she pleases. Even when she sucks on his tongue as evocatively as she can, until little half-whines keep rising in Duncan’s chest.

She kisses his cheeks, the corners of his mouth, his chin, savoring the scrape of facial hair against her lips that already feel tender, half-bruised. Sometimes she thinks that all of her is bruised, one way or another. Pressing down on it can be the best relief.

_There you are. I feel you. There you are._

“I’m sorry,” he says, breathless, after only a moment or perhaps a hundred kisses later. She is winded, and when Duncan tips her onto her side on the bed, Erica goes. Her mouth is tingling, skin a little raw from the scrape of his beard.

She takes a deep breath. This feels important to get right. “No?”

The look on Duncan’s face is pained; his pupils are blown and his face is flushed and he looks wrecked in the best way. Erica wants to do it again. Do it better. She listens instead.

Duncan’s fingers find hers on the bed, tangling together. “Just…not yet.”

“Can I hold you to that?”

He smiles properly then, the crinkle-eyed grin she rarely sees. “Please do.”

_**five**._  
  


All things end.  
  


Not cleanly, perhaps, or permanently. There will be sentencing. There may be an appeal. But there does come a day, a sticky August afternoon, when there are no more witnesses to call, no testimonies left to be heard. It feels like a kind of freedom.

From the steps of the courthouse she can see the Thames, slivers of grey-brown against a pale and cloudy sky. She didn’t expect to be in London for so long when all of this began, but now Erica tucks a bit of windblown hair behind her ear and takes in the sight of this—not home, but not so strange anymore. A city for the summer, for the changing of the seasons. It feels so many worlds away from the crypt-like stillness of Delphi House. She tries to fill her lungs with all that light and sound and life she's found, and slowly lets it out again.

Duncan waits beside her, patient. Only when she turns and meets his eyes does he ask, “Ready?”

They haven’t talked yet, not really. Not the way they need to. But Erica thinks they will soon, in a future not obscured by smoke and shadow, a place where no more secrets lie in wait.

For now, she takes his outstretched hand.

That feels like freedom, too.

**Author's Note:**

> (yes i did name her "erica sandra" to hide cassandra in there... just a sprinkling of oracle humor for you... i put on my jester hat and slink into the night)
> 
> To my recipient, cricket_aria: It was so cool to be matched with someone else who loved this game and this pairing! I hope this fic hit some of the notes you were hoping for; I had so much fun creating it. have a safe & wonderful holiday season ♡


End file.
